Oolite Bulletins

i am reding a book about life in space and i found a definition of life that says:
- low entropie
- energy exchange
- metabolism
- growth
- reproduction
- informationstoring
- evolution
- reacts to surroundings
- emergent characteristics

normal viruses dont count as lifeforms because they need a host (cells) to reproduce themself.
However if you could say that normal viruses are life forms if you assume that the host is part of this lifetype.

So i thought that computerviruses fullfill - with the assumption that the (computer)host is part of the virus - every point of this list:
- low entropie: hasnt the maximum entropy that is possoble (coded by a proprammer)
- energy exchange: transforms electrical energy into heat
- metabolism: (not really a counting point, if you imagin a artificial general intelligence in the IBM quantumcomputer: this does not do metabolism;
maybe you can say that logic operations in the memory/storage and in the cpu are equivalent)
- growth: a good computervirus tries to create as many copies on as many computers as possible
- reproduction: same as above
- informationstoring: of course a computervirus stores its code
- evolution: evolution can be implemented and i am not 100%-sure but i think there were already evolutionary computerviruses
- reacts to surroundings: can also be implemented (e.g. "create a copie of virus.exe if you have access to the ip-address 1984::::1.93.4xFF")
- emergent characteristics: every programmer knows that if you coded a very complex program sometimes it happens that it does something youd not expect

So is there something wrong with my definition of life or was it that easy to create artificial life?
(not that i find it easy to program a computervirus (i never have done it))

Hi tsoj,

No expert here but I think you may have missed something here:

tsoj wrote:

- growth: a good computervirus tries to create as many copies on as many computers as possible
- reproduction: same as above

I don't think that holds true. Growth is not replication of seperate copies, that would have more in common with reproduction. Growth would be expansion (and not merely accumulation) of a single individual (or copy, if you like).

tsoj wrote:

- emergent characteristics: every programmer knows that if you coded a very complex program sometimes it happens that it does something youd not expect

Also your reasoning re emergent characteristics appears to rely on the perspective of the programmer being surprised by his/her creation. I'm not sure exactly what was meant to be defined by this category but it seems unlikely that a scientific definition of life should rely on a possible reaction of a creator in order to define the creation as alive.

Even in biology I think an entirely satisfactory definition of life is elusive however, so your post is food for thought.